Anyone who has ever seen Broken Social Scene perform in their A1 configuration knows that Leslie Feist (singer of You Forgot It in People's "Almost Crimes") has roughly six backrooms worth of charisma stockpiled in her lighter pocket alone. Yet, despite that her tenure in the scene-stealing department extends back to her days with the middling indie rock outfit By Divine Right, Feist has always approached her solo career with agonizing apprehension. Her solo debut, Monarch, appeared in 1999, and while a serviceable indie rock record, it did little to communicate the swaggery gleam of her stage persona.
Nearly five years removed from that debut, Let It Die finds Feist in a radically different state of mind, completely abandoning her guitars-and-strings indie rock shorthand in favor of folk, jazz, French pop, and disco accoutrements. While her propensity for serial genre-hopping makes it difficult for the album to congeal into a whole (Let It Die's scattered closing trilogy comprises covers of songs by Ron Sexsmith, The Bee Gees and 1940s vocalist Dick Haymes), it is nonetheless held together by her wistful song selection and an airy, summery aesthetic.
Although many of its originals were sparked in Toronto, where Feist first cut them as four-track demos, the bulk of Let It Die was realized and recorded in Paris with the assistance of fellow Canadian expat Jason Beck, better known as Peaches collaborator Chilly Gonzales. Emblazoned with jazzy guitar shapes, droning vibes, crisp percussion, toothless synths, smoothed-out samples and Feist's slippery vocals, the music sloshes around the stereo channel like liquid in a canister. It's no wonder that, despite her protestation, reviewers have quite reasonably taken to calling it Feist's French pop album; whether intentional or not, Let It Die shares all sorts of characteristics with our archetypal vision of Paris. "Whimsical," "romantic" and "adventurous" are all adjectives that apply.
With five original songs followed by six covers, Let It Die intimates its own Side A/B divide, of which the former is undoubtedly the stronger half. We begin with "Gatekeeper", a sparse, jazzy lament on love's inconstancy that at once establishes the album's central theme; namely, the juggling act involved in reconciling boundless romanticism and optimism for the future with the soured relationships and broken hearts of the past. One of the summer's gentlest, most natural pop melodies follows with first single "Mushaboom", from which we're gently airlifted into the title track. Featuring a funereal organ line and a weak pulse of a drum beat, "Let It Die" yields one of the album's stillest moments. Equal parts relationship swansong, a reproach to a former lover, and a hardening act (chorus: "The saddest part of a broken heart isn't the ending so much as the start"), it is also the album's emotional centerpiece.
Comprising covers of material by FraxE7oise Hardy, Sexsmith and others, Side B is decidedly less rewarding. Among Feist's least essential readings is her version of Sexsmith's "Secret Heart", which, although lovingly rendered, betrays the original's vulnerability to a tangle of cutesy string plucks and whiz-bang synth sounds. When things work, as they do on her softly lit, glossy rendition of The Bee Gees' "Inside Out" and her black-and-white take on Haynes' black-and-white piano ballad "Now at Last", they verge on inspired, but I too often found myself willfully ignoring the implications of her aggregate five original songs over the last four years and stubbornly unwishing some of the more extraneous covers in favor of more of her own material.
Ultimately, however, Feist's charm is such that it doesn't matter all that much who writes the songs so long as they're the right ones. Indeed, one of the major reasons Let It Die hits is because Feist finally knows precisely what she's aiming at. For that quantum leap in wisdom, we'll grant her the aforementioned five-year hiatus, but after this record, we're not likely to be as patient again.
